Our silence has been broken! After what was to readers of this page a long interval of apparent nothingness, the product of our work and training is evident. On Saturday, we attended the Winter Wreckage competition in Rocklin. Unlike all of our other competitions before this point, this competition featured only PLANTS (plastic antweight bots) in three classes (beginner, intermediate, and open). And for the past several months up until hours before the competition, both our new and experienced builders have refined their bots to make them ready for intense combat with many of the dozens of bots in this large tournament. And due to the skill of our team members and the thoroughness of our teaching, all of the bots placed firmly in the intermediate or open brackets. This focus of this competition on PLANTS provided an excellent learning experience while freeing 15lb-team members from rushing to prepare Angular Aggression and REV3.
Competition performance can be reviewed here for intermediate, or here for open. To ensure that all bots would get several fights, the top performers from groups of 4 advanced into final brackets, so be sure to click through the tabs on the left.
The competition allowed all of our builders to get a good taste of competition, to learn where they made mistakes or left inefficiencies and what can be improved. Some may have to redesign top plates, or change their driving strategy. That said, we had some particularly high performers. Squirtle Bot lost the final match of the intermediate, while Concrete Cooper and the Robocelot both made it to semifinals. And in open, Event Horizon won four matches consecutively before losing in the final bracket. All of these bots were entirely new bots, and many were forged by builders who hadn’t heard the term PLANT 5 months ago.
As if the competition wasn’t already good enough, it brought with itself an additional advantage. In previous years, teams had to wait a whole year before fighting again unless they went to events independently. But now, teams will get to fight again after a month and a half of iteration and improvement, proving their merit and demonstrating their improvement at Sacramento Bot Battles. The skill of iteration is crucial not just to higher weight classes, but to engineering in general; and after all, the robotics club provides valuable education to prepare students for their futures.